The Poachers
by Jake Hunter
Summary: Three Predators attack an alien hive to take the skull of the queen. Send comments!


            I first tasted poacher flesh on a day in which the scouts were far a field searching for nourishment for our young.  The home-guards were resting in their niches when the poacher-craft landed in the field of growing things outside our lair.  From the craft came three poachers.  They were tall, like the guardian-sisters are tall, but they stood unbent, with straight body lines and limbs that were thick and powerful.  Their faces were plain and looked like metal, but with two eyes, compound and glowing red.  Unlike the guardian-sisters they bore no crown; instead, there fell beside their heads many dreadlocks, thick as cables.  They were poachers and they were phantoms, because we could not see them when we looked through the darkness to see the guidelines of our shadowed home.  Yet when we looked to hunt them, as we look to hunt all living things, they were surrounded by an emerald glow, and they were visible to us in any dimness.  

            They entered our home at once and sought our Mother.  This made us furious, yet we waited for them to pass the outer home-guards, waited in our dark and secret places for Mother to let us fight for her.  Then the poachers drew deeper inside, and Mother loosed us on them.  My brothers and sisters crept from nook and cleft and leaped at them, and our voices rose in hissing fury, but the poachers wielded bladed staves and claws and hated blue-white flame, and we were ordered back when half our number fell.  Still the poachers remained unscathed, moving ever-farther inward as we hid in shadows and watched and waited.  All the while we thought, "Why do we wait?  They threaten you, Mother, you and the children!  You need but gesture and we will run and die!"

            But Mother held us back until the three poachers came to the Choke.  Now they were right outside our Mother's chamber.  Our thoughts were dark with bloodlust then, for all who threaten our Mother must die.

            Mother was unworried, though, and bade us assemble high above at the roof of the Choke so as to fall upon the poachers from above.  We feared them, the poachers and their blades and their flame, but we loved our Mother more, so we bared our teeth and pounced.  Then the Choke was filled with fighting, and as the struggle raged away the three were soon divided.  

            So it was that I found myself part of a circle of my brothers and sisters, and in the center was a poacher.  Our blood had scarred him, our teeth had pierced him, and our talons had ripped his flesh and torn his metal mask away, showing that he had a face like a crab's.  And though he was naked, hurt and hopeless, still he stood, low and ready, in the middle of the circle of dancing shadows.  We hissed and roared and our voices were fell with wrath as we chanted death for the lonely warrior.  Even as he readied his spear to meet his end while fighting, there came among us a guardian-sister, and for her the circle broke.  

            She was tall, taller than the poacher, and her crown was sleek and black; her voice was hoarse and sharp as she bent low with wide-splayed arms to sing her challenge.  

            The two made no move until they circled, and even then they waited, watching, and the ring of brothers and sisters was silent.  Then the poacher and the guardian-sister fell upon each other, and slash followed feint followed slash.  Yet the guardian-sister was undaunted by the flashing blades, and shortly bested him.  Then she turned her back, and the circle drew in close, and my jaws tasted poacher meat as I put an end to his days.

            Of the other two poachers, one fell likewise, and the third got so far as Mother's lair, where she herself dispatched him in a single blow.  That was the end of it, and the poachers never came for us again in my lifetime.

            Even as we mourned for our fallen brothers and sisters, we took our joy and pride in that our Mother was safe once more to rear her silent children.  The hive would live on, and so all the death meant something.


End file.
